Blowing Up in His Face

According to news reports (I got it from the New York Times) North Korea has made a nuclear test. The Russians claim its force is between 5 and 15 kilotons and the United States Geological Survey detected a tremor of 4.2 magnitude on the Korean Peninsula.

President Bush is not happy about this. Nor should he be.

Kim Jong-Il is one step closer to the bomb, and there's nothing this country can do about it. President Bush is impotent in the face of a nuclear North Korea.

And you know what? It's his fault.

It was Bush who stopped the process of engagement with North Korea that the Clinton Adminstration began and that his own Secretary of State advised him to continue. It was Bush who labeled North Korea part of the so-called "Axis of Evil" and then went on to invade a sovereign nation that had no aggressive intentions towards us.

By invading Iraq, Bush sent a clear message to both Iran and North Korea: If you want to keep from being invaded by the United States, do anything you can to procure nuclear weapons as fast as you can. Can you really blame them for heeding this message? What leader, however deranged, would want his country to resemble the slaughterhouse that Iraq is today because of us?

And what exactly can we do about this situation? Nothing. Sanctions would be a joke. Kim Jong-Il has shown that he could care less if his people starve to death by the millions, so why should he give a shit about sanctions? And there is no military option. Our 37,000 troops in South Korea would be trampled over by North Korea's 1,000,000-man army as they swarmed their way to Seoul, which is less than 40 miles from the DMZ.

So we're stuck. Kim Jong-Il either has the bomb or will have it shortly, and there's nothing we can do about it. Thanks to George W. Bush.

Tom Moran